Arriving from the north, we found the 40,000-year old red and black gravels and cartoon-like cinder cone particularly striking in the 90º F orange late evening sunset.

We turned off the highway, drove up the rocky side roads for a bit, took out one of Chris Woebken's Dürer-inspired perspectival devices from the Venue repertoire, and snapped a few photographs as the day came to an end.

The title of this post, meanwhile, comes from William L. Fox's book The Void, The Grid & The Sign, about landmarks, or the lack thereof, and what Fox might call the neurological challenge of navigating desert regions (specifically the Great Basin).

In that book's opening chapter, Fox describes an almost Tron-like image of human movement through landscapes that, upon first contact, appear to be empty. "We label desert the 'void' and move over its surface," Fox writes, "looking at it from different angles in an attempt to establish the sight lines and degrees of parallax necessary to measure it. We map the void with a grid of intersecting lines and travel along them, erecting signs to guide us."